A new novel of mine, The Ash Tree, has been published by West of West Books in conjunction with the April 24, 2015 centenary of the Armenian genocide; it recounts the lives of an Armenian-American family and the sweep of their history in the twentieth century - particularly from the points of view of two women in the family as it builds a new life in California.

There are three other novels of mine - one is Pathological States, about a physician's family in L.A. in 1962, which is as yet unpublished; another is Hungry Generations, about a young composer's friendship in L.A. with the family of a virtuoso pianist, published on demand by iUniverse; and Acts of Terror and Contrition - a nuclear fable - is my political novella (with eight stories) from Amazon's Createspace, about Israel and its reactions to the first Iraq War in 1990 (with the fear then that Saddam Hussein's missile bombardment might contain a nuclear weapon).From a review of "Acts" on Amazon.com:"At times the reader races ahead to find out the fate of the cast of characters and the fate of nations. At others the reader is stopped mid-page to consider the paradoxes of the nuclear world and the world of realpolitik. This is an important, timely book that deserves a wide audience." For a fuller description of them, look for the relevant blog posts below or click on one of the Amazon.com links. KINDLE editions of these novels are also available.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Radiation and the destruction of the future

The passage of time since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster offers some perspective on the threat to nuclear installations posed by severe earthquakes and tidal waves. As the concern over the August earthquake in Virginia shows, it remains an issue whether the nuclear plants across the United States, with their long record of shut-downs, would hold up under the conditions which prevailed in Japan last March.

A question that haunts the newspaper and magazine reports is one I was taught to ask by my late father, Dr. Perry Melnick, a pathologist researching the effect of radiation on our cells. That question is how close the residents of an affected region – now especially Japan – came to being exposed to the mutilating effect of radiation on human genes. [Radiation's potential assault on genetic inheritance is one focus of my new novel Acts of Terror and Contrition: a nuclear fable. - see the side bar links. ]

Our awareness of the destructiveness of radiation grew exponentially in the aftermath of America’s atomic bombing of two Japanese cities at the end of World War Two, but scientific knowledge of those effects began to develop earlier in the twentieth century. In the 1930s, for example, my father published his research into “the deleterious effects of radiation on human subjects.” When the earthquake in Japan spurred the tsunami, the critical failure of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, and the release of radiation into the environment, I thought about what my father’s response would have been.

The sloppiness of maintenance, the lax attitude toward the storage of nuclear material, and the risks taken by the nuclear industry and accepted by the Japanese government – all these would have earned my father’s censure. And he would be shocked by the generally cavalier attitude prevailing today toward the nuclear radiation generated by power plants – including those throughout the United States. My father would also have seen the disaster at Fukushima as an opportunity to alert us to our responsibility to eliminate from the planet poorly designed, sloppily maintained, and dangerously positioned nuclear energy installations. The Japanese crisis presents a “teachable moment,” an object lesson about radiation’s danger to future generations and to all organic life on Earth.

My own first lesson as a child about such dangers was a gift given by my Uncle Alvin to my family living then in Los Angeles; he was an economist working with General MacArthur during the occupation of Japan, and his present to us was a four inch square roofing tile found near the Sairenji Temple at the Hiroshima explosion center. I have it here before me. The tile is smooth and very hard, except that half of one side is darkened and eaten away by the immense heat of the atomic bomb explosion.

My second lesson was offered by my father in the early 1950s. He instructed me about the absurdity of my elementary school’s atomic bomb drills, when the bell would ring its alarm and we fourth-graders would assume a crouching position beneath our little desks. He explained in simple terms that the school and the whole city would likely be vaporized. Those who survived would bear the stigmata of radioactive fallout’s effects in their genes and so pass on a deformed genetic inheritance to the next generation. In the early 1960s, during the height of the Cold War, I remember his outrage at the resumption of atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs, pumping bursts of radioactivity into the air we breathe.

Of course, my father did not reject all uses of nuclear radiation, for his research helped to validate its medical applications, notably in the treatment of cancer. But he would have insisted that the Fukushima nuclear disaster must serve to show us how irresponsible and immoral is an unthinking and passive attitude toward the dangers of radiation.

Thirty years ago, Jonathan Schell explained that “the fate of the earth” is at stake, and he eloquently called for the elimination of all nuclear weapons and the strict control of nuclear power. As research has revealed for a century, the consequences of multiple releases of radiation into the environment are a geometric increase in cancer rates and in irremediable genetic mutations. The crisis at Fukushima Daiichi should remind us that the destruction of the future is the risk we face.

Buy "Hungry Generations" here - a novel about L.A. and European expatriates living there.

Purchase "Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music" here.

About Me

"The Ash Tree" about a family of Armenian-Americans, from 1915 to the early 1970s, is being published April 24, 2015, on the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. My 2004 novel "Hungry Generations" is about the encounter between a young composer in L.A. in the 70s and the family of a great virtuoso pianist, who knew Schoenberg and Stravinsky there in the 40s. Also, there's my critical book on modern fiction and music, "Fullness of Dissonance" (1994), as well as various stories and articles in print. My novella and story collection "Acts of Terror and Contrition" was published in 2011. Current projects: "Pathological States" (an unpublished novel), "Conrad in the Twentieth Century" and "Beethoven and modernity" (both non-fiction books). I'm married to the artist Jeanette Arax Melnick, whose paintings are on the cover of three of my books. You can contact me either by leaving a comment on a post or at danielcmelnick@gmail.com.